An Activity with a Cell Phone

 An Activity with a Cell Phone

This activity was done in a workshop for teachers of English working at the DGEP (Direccion General de Escuelas Preparatorias), high school teachers of English.

The activity was to show a simple but effective way to use cell phones in the language classroom.

Steps:

• The class was divided into teams of 3 members each. There were 28 teachers. Therefore there were 8 teams of 3 members and a team of 4 members.
• It was asked to name a captain in each team.
• The captain has to name a representative.
• The representatives had to come to the front to watch a video on the teacher’s cell phone. The video was taken –and adapted- from the British Council (www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-my-dad.htm).
• The representatives watched the video 3 times and went back to their teams to tell his/her partners in the team what the video was about. They had to do it like whispering, it was “top secret”.
• When the representatives finished describing the story/video they got together again, this time to describe the story on a piece of paper, individually. This was done to give time the teams to describe on paper what their representative told them. It was a writing and discussion activity without the representative.
• The third member had to do the role of the editor besides discussing what to include in the description.
• When the teams finished, they compared what they wrote.
• Finally the representatives compared what they individually wrote to select the best and read it aloud to the class in order for the teams to compare.
• The last activity was to show everyone –with a projector- the video. this way they could see how close they were in their descriptions.
• The video was presented two times, the first time as the representatives watched it, with images and audio but not text. The second one was with audio, images, and written text.

The video was captured from the site with the help of a screen capture site, http://screenr.com/

This post was submitted by Carlos Raul Lopez Reatiga.